COMPENSATING PRICES

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22339, 1 March 1938, Page 13

COMPENSATING PRICES

to the aniToa or the rassa. Sir, —“Dairy Farmer” is meandering when he states that I drew a distinction between wages and salaries. I did nothing of the kind. I was amazed at his inability to differentiate between goods and services, and I affirmed that farmers do not sell their labour to the Government at so much an hour; they sell a product at so much a pound. That statement is true and undeniable. There is no need to bo perturbed on account of the newspapers condemning the waterside workers. The employers are provoking their workers on the wharves by adopting “pinpricking” tactics which cause disputes. When the men refuse to accept the intolerable impositions they are said to have “gone on strike"; actually it is a “lock-out.” The campaign of incitement against workers on the waterfront is a timehonoured means to estrange people from a progressive government which is friendly towards the workers. Away back in the Liberal era Richard John Seddon proclaimed that the newspapers “dished up” waterside disputes for breakfast, dinner, and tea. Your correspondent is confident that his friend, who lost his farm during the depression, would refuse to leave his present job as a “wharfie” to return to the dairy industry. “Dairy Farmer” may be s “confidence man,” but that is not to say we are gullible people, I remarked that if the Government were to take over the dairy industry and employ the farmers as labourers, under a shift system, at the rate of 2s 9Jd an hour for a 40-hour week, the gentlemen in question would soon be clamouring to regain their previous status. Your correspondent stated that be “is confident (again!) of this, that if the Government did, and worked it under the same conditions as apply to other Government jobs, the cost of the manufactured article (butter) would be double the price it is to-day.” That merely means the cost of production of the article would rise. If that is to be regarded as an answer to my contention, then I must admit that to me it is neither relevant nor explicit—-

but maybe we do not speak the same language. Could “Dairy Farmer” explain logically the mechanism of the “compensating price”? He has indulged mostly in an attack on the wage-earners. The farmers who are “yowling” about their poverty seem much akin to the thrifty type of people who dress up in pxa clothes and go into the street posing as beggars. Mr Colin Clark, the renowned statistician, divulged the true position when he said, “New Zealand farmers are the best off in the world. No other farmers come near the New Zealand standard of living. The farmmg community is on the average better off than the urban community, for, numbering 20 per cent, of the population, they enjoy at present 30 per cent, of the national income." , By the way, how many ‘ wharncs have streamlined motor-cars? —Yours, etC ’’ WIDE AWAKE. Hokitika, February 28, 1938.